By Jacob Mertens. A stretch of cute neighborhoods with picket fences, green lawns. A traveling carnival filled with trailers and sideshow burnouts. A shack buried out in the forest, surrounded by pine trees and old cars sinking back into nature. Ultimately, it does not matter what you call home, it […]
Star Trek Into Darkness
By Cleaver Patterson. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) dispels the widely held assumption that sci-fi extravaganzas are, on the whole, aimed purely at the teenage / geek market. Here, it can be comfortably claimed, is the thinking man’s blockbuster, a film that doesn’t forgo intellect in favour of spectacle. That’s […]
Iron Man 3 (2013)
By Jacob Mertens. Many hinge the success and failure of a superhero film on whether villains can entice and excite the audience, or whether heroes can effectively transcend their humanity and conquer the odds. These are irrelevant concerns when placed next to the crucial component of all great action films: […]
Interview with Sean Dunne and Michael Moore, Tribeca Film Festival
May 7, 2013
By Gary M. Kramer. One of the best documentaries at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival was director Sean Dunne’s Oxyana, a strong and searing film about an epidemic of addiction. Showcasing 18 residents of Oceana, a West Virginian town crippled by Oxycontin drug dependency, the film features lyrical shots of […]
SXSW 2013 Festival Report
By Jacob Mertens. I have become convinced that I bring bad weather with me to Austin. For the last three years I have attended the SXSW Film Festival, and for the last three years it has rained on me. In one absurd moment in 2012, I rode a friend’s bike […]
Whatever Makes You Happy (2010)
By Robert Kenneth Dator. This little film makes me happy. It’s not little in subject. It’s not little in heart. As a matter of fact, everything about Whatever Makes You Happy is big but the budget, which was positively miniscule. It’s just that it’s tidy and squared away and neat […]
Interview with Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado, Tribeca Film Festival
May 3, 2013
By Gary M. Kramer. The 2013 Tribeca Film Festival presented the world premiere of Big Bad Wolves, a thriller from Israeli filmmakers Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado. The pair’s previous film, Rabies, showed at Tribeca in 2011, and this stylish film shows their maturation. Big Bad Wolves is an intense horror-comedy […]
32nd International Istanbul Film Festival Dedicated to Memory through Superb Literary Adaptations and a Sense of Nostalgia
May 2, 2013
By N. Buket Cengiz. At the 32nd International Istanbul Film Festival organized by İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), which ran from March 30th to April the 14th, outstanding examples of the art of cinema from all around the world were screened yet again this year. The film What […]
Things I Don’t Understand (2012)
By Robert Kenneth Dator. The Tension Between Being and Nothingness Jean Paul Sartre wouldn’t mind my purloining Being and Nothingness, as Things I Don’t Understand is very much an existentialist treatise, conscious or otherwise. From the ontological notion of absurdity—that is to say that life is absurd because it has […]
The Disquieting Aura of Fabián Bielinsky
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. “I said no to Hollywood. There you have no freedom to create.” (Bielinsky to Federico Fahsbender) “Film audiences won’t find in [The Aura] an accessible or agreeable story. Also, the film doesn’t show a bit of sympathy or good intentions for any of the […]